Blue Eyes Descended From What Mythical Creature?
From unicorns to ancient horses and heroes — the symbolism of the blue eye – The unicorn — a wild, single-horned and horse-like animal — appears in Greek Mythology. The Greek historian and writer Ctesias described the unicorn as a mythical creature whose horn possessed healing powers. 
What did blue eyes originate from?
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1. Only 8 Percent of the World’s Population Has Blue Eyes If you have got blue eyes, you might just belong to one of the world’s most exclusive groups without realising it! Since blue eyes are genetically recessive, only 8 percent of the world’s population has blue eyes.
- While blue eyes are significantly less common than brown eyes worldwide, they are frequently found from nationalities located near the Baltic Sea in northern Europe.2.
- There is No Blue Pigment in Blue Irises The colour of our eyes depends on how much melanin is present in the iris.
- Blue eyes get their colour the same way water and the sky get their blue colour — they scatter light so that more blue light reflects back out.
The iris is made up of two layers. For almost everyone — even people with blue eyes — the back layer (called the pigment epithelium) has brown pigment in it. The front layer of the iris (called the stroma) is made up of overlapping fibers and cells. For people with brown eyes, some of the cells also have brown pigment in them.
If there is no pigment at all in this front layer, the fibers scatter and absorb some of the longer wavelengths of light that come in. More blue light gets back out and the eyes appear to be blue.3. Blue Eyes are More Sensitive to Light Melanin in the iris of the eye appears to help protect the back of the eye from damage caused by UV radiation and high-energy visible “blue” light from sunlight and artificial sources of these rays.
Since blue eyes contain less melanin than green, hazel or brown eyes, photophobia is more prevalent in blue eyes compared to darker coloured eyes. For these reasons, having less melanin in your irises means that you need to protect your eyes more from the sun’s UV rays.
Therefore, it is recommended to those with blue eyes to stay out of the sun for long periods of time and try to wear protective eyewear when you are outdoors.4. All Blue-Eyed People May Have A Common Ancestor Originally we all had brown eyes, however, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen, it appears that a genetic mutation in a single individual in Europe 6,000 to 10,000 years ago led to the development of blue eyes.
Therefore, we can conclude that this genetic mutation is the cause of eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today. What is the genetic mutation? A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes.
- The OCA2 gene codes for the ‘P protein’, which is involved in the production of melanin (the pigment that determines the colour of our eyes, skin and hair).
- The “switch”, does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue.
According to Hans Eiberg, associate professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine from the University of Copenhagen, “From this, we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” 5.
Blue Eyes at Birth Doesn’t Mean Blue Eyes For Life While blue eyes may be rare, they’re among the most common eye colours at birth. Since the human eye does not have its full adult amount of pigment at birth, most Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes. However, since human melanin tends to develop over time — this causes the child’s eye colour to change as more melanin is produced in the iris during early childhood.6.
People With Blue Eyes May Have a Higher Risk of Alcoholism A new study suggests that individuals with blue eyes are at a higher risk for alcohol dependency compared to those with darker eyes. Therefore, this finding adds further evidence to the idea that alcoholism has a genetic component.
A study published in American Journal of Medical Genetics, Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics found that European Americans with blue eyes had up to 83 percent higher odds of becoming dependent on alcohol, compared with matched controls who had darker eye colours. This research suggests that alcoholism has a genetic component linked to genetic sequences that determine eye colour, which may help explain the association.
However, at this stage, the reason for the correlation is still unknown and further research is required to fully understand this correlation in the findings.7. You Can’t Predict the Colour of Your Child’s Eyes Since it was once believed that eye colour — including blue eyes — was a simple genetic trait, many people used to believe that blue-eyed people could only have blue-eyed children.
Before geneticists fully understood how human eye colour inheritance works, a child’s eye colour to used be used as a paternity test — based on the assumption that you could predict a child’s eye colour if you knew the colour of the parents’ eyes and perhaps the colour of the grandparents’ eyes. But geneticists now know that this concept is far more complicated, as eye colour is influenced by an interaction of as many as 16 different genes — not just one or two genes as once thought.
Additionally, the anatomic structure of the iris can also influence eye colour to some degree. In summary, it’s impossible to know for sure if your children will have blue eyes. Even if you and your partner both have blue eyes, that’s no guarantee your child’s eyes will also be blue.
What ethnicities have the most blue eyes?
Where Do You Find The Majority of Blue-Eyed People? – Europe has the widest variety of eye color, according to Custers, who adds those of European descent are the largest population of blue eyes. Europe was the epicenter of the blue-eye gene mutation. More than 80 percent of the inhabitants of Estonia and Scandinavian countries have blue eyes.
Who has the highest Neanderthal DNA?
Africans carry surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA For 10 years, geneticists have told the story of how Neanderthals—or at least their DNA sequences—live on in today’s Europeans, Asians, and their descendants. Not so in Africans, the story goes, because modern humans and our extinct cousins interbred only outside of Africa.
A new study overturns that notion, revealing an unexpectedly large amount of Neanderthal ancestry in modern populations across Africa. It suggests much of that DNA came from Europeans migrating back into Africa over the past 20,000 years. “That gene flow with Neanderthals exists in all modern humans, inside and outside of Africa, is a novel and elegant finding,” says anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
The work, reported in this week’s issue of Cell, could also help clear up a mysterious disparity: why East Asians appear to have more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans. As members of Homo sapiens spread from Africa into Eurasia some 70,000 years ago, they met and mingled with Neanderthals.
Researchers knew that later back-migrations of Europeans had introduced a bit of Neanderthal DNA into African populations, but previous work suggested it was a just a smidgen. In contrast, modern Europeans and East Asians apparently inherited about 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals. Previous efforts simply assumed that Africans largely lacked Neanderthal DNA.
To get more reliable numbers, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Joshua Akey compared the genome of a Neanderthal from Russia’s Altai region in Siberia, sequenced in 2013, to 2504 modern genomes uploaded to the 1000 Genomes Project, a catalog of genomes from around the world that includes five African subpopulations.
- The researchers then calculated the probability that each stretch of DNA was inherited from a Neanderthal ancestor.
- The researchers found that African individuals on average had significantly more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about 17 megabases (Mb) worth, or 0.3% of their genome.
- They also found signs that a handful of Neanderthal genes may have been selected for after they entered Africans’ genomes, including genes that boost immune function and protect against ultraviolet radiation.
The results jibe with as-yet-unpublished work by Sarah Tishkoff, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. She told Science she has also found higher-than-expected levels of apparent Neanderthal DNA in Africans. The best fit model for where Africans got all this Neanderthal DNA suggests about half of it came when Europeans—who had Neanderthal DNA from previous matings—migrated back to Africa in the past 20,000 years.
The model suggests the rest of the DNA shared by Africans and the Altai Neanderthal might not be Neanderthal at all: Instead, it may be DNA from early modern humans that was simply retained in both Africans and Eurasians—and was picked up by Neanderthals, perhaps when moderns made a failed migration from Africa to the Middle East more than 100,000 years ago.
Akey’s study might help explain another “head scratcher,” says computer biologist Kelley Harris of the University of Washington, Seattle. Studies had suggested East Asians have 20% more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, she notes. “Europe is where Neanderthal remains are found, so why wouldn’t Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry than any other group?” By suggesting that Europeans introduced Neanderthal sequences into Africa, the new study points to an explanation: Researchers previously assumed that Neanderthal sequences shared by Europeans and Africans were modern and subtracted them out.
Why are blue eyes so attractive?
Home Lifestyle People With Blue Eyes Are More Attractive, Says Science
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and apparently things always come up looking blue. 
Credit: iStock / SanneBerg It looks like Frank Sinatra had it right this entire time. And while a lot of people might not agree with this at first, there’s a new report that says people with blue eyes are more attractive than their brown-eyed counterparts.
And yes, science does have something to do with the findings. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and apparently things always come up looking blue. A group of researchers at Germany’s University of Regensburg decided to do a study on which eye color is seen as more attractive: blue or brown? Researchers Martin Gründl, Sebastian Knoll, Marita Eisenmann-Klein, and Lukas Prantl asked 80 participants to rate the attractiveness of 60 women aged 15 to 65 by just looking at photos of their eyes.
And while there was no correlation found between iridal color and their rated attractiveness, the researchers did point out one thing: that the participants picked out the color blue more often as a positive aspect than other iridal colors. Also, those with large blue eyes usually have better luck in the love department: blue eyes and larger pupils often correlate with youthfulness, along with being attractive. 
Credit: iStock / SanneBerg In another poll by social networking site Badoo, 60 percent of men said that they thought brunettes with blue eyes were the most attractive. A third of the men found brown hair to be the most attractive; 28.6 percent said they prefer black hair.
In addition, the same study also found that men preferred women who had green eyes over those with brown eyes. Yet, the majority of both men and women found blue to be the most attractive eye color over all. If you happen to be a green-eyed beauty though, don’t fret. Reports say that the green eye color is the rarest color found around the world, and it is estimated that only around 2% of the world’s population has green colored eyes.
Green eye color is a result of a mild amount of pigmentation in the eye with a golden tint. But if there is one color that happens to be even more rare than green eyes, it’s violet. Elizabeth Taylor was famous for her violet eyes, although in reality she had baby blues.